Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

Nice work. I like the idea and it looks like you've executed it really well.

I'm curious how you determine whether a given review is positive or negative, did you use something like http://nltk.org/ ?

Beautiful and useful website that I look forward to come back to. I, however, thought that the "RottenTomatoes for Books" was Amazon. In what is this site different?

Amazon is user reviews only. We like RottenTomatoes aggregate from professional critics like NYTimes & select bloggers to create a book recommendation of higher quality.

Very cool. One feature that RT has that you don't have yet is the ability to see all reviews by a reviewer/institution.

Actually, being able to see all books by the author would be especially useful. And it's a view more particularly essential than it is for RT (since an author has a more singularly important role in the quality of a work, compared to the actors/studios/directors/writers/producers/financial backing that go behind a successful movie)...being able to see an average for an author's books, or even a sparkline (to see if he/she is going downhill) would add a lot of value with minimal effort.

Related to that: I know it's kind of important to people to see the blurb, which necessitates a multi-column layout for the listed reviews. But I'd rather see it in a tabular format, with Reviewer Name, Date, Rating, and then a long field for 20-30 word blurb. It's easier to see distribution of reviews in a tabular format.

Nice UI!

Two minor comments:

1) Sometimes the same book shows up in different columns (e.g. Bestsellers and Recent Fiction). This feels redundant (and possibly unintentional?)

2) There's a Sign Up link. What does signing up do? Is it to write reviews? Subscribe to new books? Something else?